THE CORRELATION STUDY BETWEEN BLOGGING HABIT AND STUDENTS’ WRITING ABILITY IN RECOUNT TEXT (The Case of the Tenth Grade of SMK Negeri 3 Semarang in the Academic Year 2010/2011).

ABSTRACT
Nuarisa, Rona. 2011. The Correlation Study Between Blogging Habit and Students ’
Writing Ability in Recount Text (The Case of the Tenth Grade of SMK Negeri 3
Semarang in the Academic Year 2010/2011). Final Project. English Department of
Faculty of Languages and Arts of Semarang State University.
Key words: blog, blogging habit, writing achievement, recount text

The objectives of this study were to find out the students’ blogging habit and their achievement in
writing recount text, and also to find out whether or not there was a correlation between students'
blogging habit and the students' achievement in writing recount text. This study was a case study and
the population of this study is the tenth grade students of SMK N 3 Semarang in the academic year
2010/2011. The sampling process was administered by applying a purposive sampling technique.
There were 10 classes among the tenth grade and I took a class of 34 students as the sample. The data
were collected through a writing recount test and interview with the students. I emphasized students
to retell their own experiences about their own experience in the New Year’s Eve into a good writing
construction. After students did the writing test, I did a small interview with each student about the
existences of their blogs, facebook and twitter, as facebook and twitter are categorized as microblogs.
From the interview, I found the students’ blogging habit. The result of the research showed that there
was a significant correlation between the students’ blogging habit and the students' achievement in
writing recount text. This result which was obtained from the computation of the correlation between
students’ blogging habit and their achievement in writing recount text applied to the sample is 0.579.

The critical value of the Pearson r with the 5% significant level is 0.339. It means that the result
obtained from the computation is greater than its critical value. Therefore, I concluded that the
correlation between two variables above is significant. In line with the result of the research, it is
suggested that the teacher can motivate the students to express their ideas, thoughts and feelings
through blogging. It proves that students who have high blogging habit will also have a good
achievement in writing especially in writing recount text.